


Dragon's Teeth, Shallow Water Steel

by deathwailart



Series: Dragon Knights [OLD] [7]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood, Bloodplay, Elves, F/F, High Fantasy, Knights - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-08
Updated: 2012-09-08
Packaged: 2017-11-13 19:46:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Title from Pieces of What by MGMT<br/>World info <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/507072/chapters/892337">here</a> with <a href="http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxh8j0jahC1r9lscbo1_400.jpg">this</a> image as inspiration (warning: blood)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dragon's Teeth, Shallow Water Steel

Her eyes light up when Ilea or Oran say that something might be dangerous.  It must be the dragon heart that beats beneath her breast, the savage thing of fire but whatever it is, Ilea loves it.  (Not that she can say love, not when the word means nothing to Tanis unless it's a thing from the past, long since buried and forgotten and ground to dust beneath her feet.  Not that Ilea knows about love much either in a family of backstabbing and petty intrigues but she thinks it could be love with Tanis.)  Tanis is the one who takes watch on camp most often and for the longest stretches because it's like the life she led before she met Ilea, before she was commanded to take part in their quest, the long stretch of years that she never talks about, at least not to Ilea.  That still hurts.  She understands that Tanis has so many reasons to hate elves, to lack the ability or want to trust Ilea but they stand as equals, their little band of three and she and Tanis have spoken of their feelings and it means something now, to at least say that who they are doesn't matter (or, in Tanis' halted words, "If it is you, Ilea, then I find little fault in whatever this might be between us") and that they never wish to be parted from one another but together they are a collection of sharp, jagged edges and raw wounds, scrapng against one another even at the lightest contact.  Tanis has never seen the sea but Ilea has and she knows that glass may be worn smooth by the ebb and flow of the tide and hopes to Solace (elves have no Gods, they see them as base things but hearing how Tanis talks of dragons with such love, devotion and hope in her voice and in her eyes, a smile threatening to turn the corners of her mouth upward, Ilea has come to love these dragons) that it will be so with them.  
  
The night is growing dark now and Tanis is patrolling, dinner finished, their tents ready as she and Oran sit around the fire and wait for Tanis to return, neither willing to sleep until the human is back.  Ilea wants to ask how Oran can be so comfortable so close to fire after the ritual she endured in Borea, the purification rite where she was set alight and sat calmly through it.  She can remember her fear, wanting to cry out but Tanis had grabbed her hand, hissing to be silent, speaking of what honour she had been shown to be allowed to see such a sacred thing.  Two of them branded by fire and Ilea still fears it.  
  
"You look worried," Oran says so suddenly that it makes Ilea jump, arrows rattling in the quiver she only removes when it is time to sleep, danger ever multiplying out here in the wilds that only Tanis knows from seven years of patrolling and even more from simply growing up, "Tanis is more capable at taking care of herself than you or I."  
  
"She's been gone too long," Ilea argues, even if she and the nymph know what a lie that is.  "We should go look for her."  
  
"The hour is late and I am in no mood to have Tanis shout at either you or I or both of us as you know full well she will should we either interrupt her and leave camp unattended or get lost in the darkness.  We will stay here."  (But only for so long.  If Tanis is gone too long then they will look because they are friends here, friends and more for Ilea and Tanis is only one woman in a harsh land, too stubborn and proud to cry for aid.)  They lapse into silence punctuated by the fire snapping and crackling, the wood collapsing abruptly at one point, enough to have Ilea jump and she _knows_ she is being more than faintly ridiculous but there are some days and nights where she wishes she could spirit Tanis away to a land that is gentle, where she could lay down her weapons and have no worries, where she could know peace.  Tanis would hate that life.  If she could erase the past and stop the humans from being pushed to extinction, if she could have stopped the war her people and the dwarves started then she could have had a Tanis free from the anger that she wears as a second layer of armour.  It hurts her in a place she doesn't have a name for to know that Tanis would not be Tanis without her struggles, her anger and her bitterness and her pragmatism that define who and what she is.  
  
Tanis returns in the midst of Ilea thinking herself into a deep dark place full of hate and rage, sheathing her blade, a gauntlet tucked beneath her arm as a pale hand pinches her nose shut but blood still trickles down from her right nostril over her lips and down between her fingers.  She's breathless but there's no limping or stiffness or any attempt to move without jostling a wound, a closer inspection reveals that her armour is untarnished.  Whoever or whatever she was up against, it proved little contest.  
  
"I knew I heard something, Oran said to stay where we were!"  Ilea protests, stumbling over her own feet in her haste to reach Tanis, to hover over her enough that the human knight will shove her away, curses on her lips and anger flashing through her eyes.   
  
"You would have been in my way," Tanis snaps, her voice muffled and changed from the hand pinching her nose shut and covering part of her mouth, "simple bandits, nothing more," and that explains a great deal as to why she is glad Ilea at least was not involved.  Tanis does not mind cutting down her own if they attack her first but she objects vehemently if Ilea should let loose, hypocrisy but Tanis has earned it and Ilea knows how to bear the shame of her people now without reacting so rashly.   
  
"Bandits so close to camp?"  Oran asks, trying to pry the hand from Tanis' face to no avail save Tanis swatting at her with her free hand, "should we worry?"  
  
"One is dead, another wounded and the third knew better and to go back to wherever they came from," Tanis replies with a shrug, swiping her tongue across her bloody teeth.  
  
"How did you come to have a bloodied nose then?"  Oran continues and Ilea wants the answer too even as Tanis sighs heavily, trudging over to the fire.  
  
"I had hoped to settle it without drawing my blade," she mumbles, eyes on the fire and just like that, the matter is dropped.  Ilea knows that even when she has good reason to attack humans that it still pains and grieves her to have to do so when there are so few.  
  
"To your bed," Oran commands as the silence stretches, bordering on uncomfortable, something she has learned from Tanis who taught her to be less passive and to learn how to be authoritative, "I will take watch, go, clean up your face."   
  
For once, Tanis does not argue and Ilea would wonder at it until she catches the woman's eyes, the pupils huge, leaving only a thin hazel ring about them, her breathing shallow and of course fighting gets her blood up, makes her bolder and less reticent and Ilea allows herself to be dragged into the tent (they've given up the pretense of separate tents and claim it lightens the load of a pack.)  Tanis seizes her, the hand gone from her nose, sticky with blood as it cups Ilea's cheek, pulling her into a fierce kiss, iron tang on Ilea's tongue, Tanis throwing off more heat than the fire until Ilea cannot stand it and pushes herself away with both hands flat on Tanis' cuirass.  
  
"Breathe," she urges and Tanis takes notice, nodding and _smiling_.  That smile does things to Ilea, makes her weak at the knees as idiotic a phrase that is.  "You will set me alight if you continue.  And remove your armour."  
  
"Is that a command?"  Those words on other nights would see either Ilea sent from the tent or Tanis out on watch, sharpening her sword to a deadly gleaming point but there is a lightness that could easily be lost when it is heard so little.  
  
"Would you like it to be?"  
  
"Perhaps you should help, the catches are not always so easy to reach," the knight offers and it's so much more than that.  Ilea has never done this save a time or two when Tanis was injured or too stiff to do this herself, this is an offering to be vulnerable in front of her as she trembles from the heat of battle (because battle is battle, it all boils down to surviving) with blood and heat heavy in the tent.  Ilea's fingers normally so deft and sure falter, her hands shaking as she finds the catches and helps Tanis out of the armour, unable to resist leaning in to kiss her, blood in her mouth again.  "Ilea."  Ilea says nothing, removes the cuirass and gets to her knees to help with the greaves and boots, a hand resting on her head.  She cannot say what drives her to do it but she takes the bloodied hand and pulls it forward, tentatively running her tongue along the index finger, somehow holding Tanis' gaze throughout as she sucks the finger clean, moving on to the next and on and on until she is kissing down to her wrist where the pulse flutters wildly and she marks it with her teeth.  There is a groan that seems so very far away.  Ilea feels as though she is on fire.  
  
(Tanis never heals those marks although she and Ilea are careful to leave them where they can be hidden, she is tempted to try somewhere new, the hollow of the human's throat where the skin is milk white and soft to the touch but there are always worries with staking claims on Tanis who has lived beneath the elven rule all her life and has hated and resented it and what it has done to her people and their dragons.)  
  
Tanis is always so quiet with everything but her anger, nostrils flaring as she drops to her knees and pushes Ilea back, breathless kisses and nips to Ilea's bottom lip and Tanis is laughing, a sound so foreign Ilea half-wonders if she is imagining it but it is there, Tanis laughing as she rests her head on Ilea's shoulder, half on top of her.  Ilea wishes all their moments could be so carefree and simple but that is not the way of Stjarnacado and so she enjoys them while they last for there is not always the promise of another, hoarding them the way some say dragons hoarded gold and jewels; these fleeting golden moments with Tanis are worth more than all the precious gems in all the world.


End file.
